My week: Olivia Williams:

Making movies? It's like giving birth

Olivia WilliamsPhoto: Rosalind Hobley

By Olivia Williams

8:00AM BST 18 Sep 2012

Filming a movie is comparable to the sexual act – including the desperate search for a mate, the courtship, the phone calls, the drama, the unpredictable hours, the excitement... Post-production is gestation. While one attempts to get on with everyday life, the movie is forming in a dark and inaccessible place, monitored by nerdy types looking at screens. Sometimes you get a hazy glimpse of the foetus when you have an appointment for Additional Dialogue Recording, but the picture is usually very bad quality. You can just about tell if it’s going to be a boy or a girl.

Then, nine months later, with a lot of preparation and fuss, you try and push it out. The dresses are usually better than your average hospital gown, and you can go for a natural birth or assisted. I’m here at the Toronto Film Festival to assist in the birth of non-identical twins. I had small parts (but as with babies, the size of a part at the birth can be deceptive) in Anna Karenina and Hyde Park on Hudson and they’re both popping out at the same time. I love both films in the passionate way you love a newborn so talking about them continuously for the next four days won’t be a problem.

The first to emerge is Anna Karenina. Arrived here with Jude [Law] and Keira [Knightley] and Matthew MacFadyen. Film premieres are coldly hierarchical affairs, and this has to be treated with a sense of humour or you could go under. One of the big tells is how high your hotel room is. Matthew and I eagerly opened our envelopes wondering what, out of a possible 15, we’d score on the celebrity ladder. He got a suite on the 6th and I grumblingly trudged off to the 5th.

Monday is Hyde Park on Hudson. I played Eleanor Roosevelt, who has been gestating nicely. My favourite quote of hers, which is good to keep handy at coldly hierarchical celebrity events, is “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent”. I think this was more aimed at people suffering under the appalling racist conditions in the American South than ageing actresses in Toronto hotels, but before I get sued for maligning my hosts, I have to tell you that the 5th floor is lovely and the festival are treating me like a goddess and I am loving every minute.

In a bid to improve my geographical knowledge I once bought a world atlas puzzle. It didn’t really help, as all the bits I didn’t really know in former Soviet Bloc were covered by one piece of puzzle. The only thing I learnt is that, even allowing for Gauss’s Theorema Egregium, most of the world is Canada. It is vast.